Meta

How A Bowl of Oatmeal Pissed Me Off

Right now, as I’m typing, the number 1 most e-mailed story on the New York Times site is Mark Bittman’s evisceration of McDonald’s oatmeal. The article pisses me off, and I’ve been trying to figure out why it pisses me off so much. It’s not because I’m such a big fan of either McDonald’s or oatmeal, both of which I’ve always considered to be food I eat, if I ever do, because it’s there and not much else is, it’s not something I ever really crave. (Your mileage on either may, of course, vary, but that’s just me.)

And truth be known, I already do most of the things that foodie scolds like Bittman think I should be doing (even more so now that my diet has been purged of stuff that makes me too ill to function), and I’m sure they’d be pleased as punch if not for the fact that I’m DEATHFAT, and thus, in their eyes, automatically in need of a conservatorship even without taking my brain cooties into account. I like the fact that Bittman, in his own way, is trying to make cooking less intimidating, and gods help me, I actually like some of his recipes. I’ve made his cornmeal pancake recipe (without the pine nuts) a couple of times, and it’s wonderful. And easy.

And I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea to talk about perceived versus actual convenience, having once been married to someone who thought it took 30 minutes to empty the dishwasher and 40 minutes to drive from San Francisco to Reno. If you have access to a grocery store, cooking space and instruments, plus a little heat-retaining storage container for your oatmeal, he’s probably right that it’s faster to just nuke some rolled oats or put them in milk and let them soak while you’re in the shower, than it is to go to McD’s. And he’s probably also right that there’s more nutritional value in that then in any kind of “instant” oatmeal, and it will be cheaper, too.

So why am I so irritated with the article? Well, for starters, Bittman is one of those “you must cook” people who make me want to throw eggs on the kitchen floor deliberately. There was another article of his that I’m too annoyed to want to bother looking up now, where he said having lousy kitchen facilities was no excuse for not cooking; after all, he lived in a place with lousy kitchen facilities, and he just asked a neighbor if he could borrow theirs! Yeah, ahem. That’s IF you know people with a better kitchen, and IF you know them well enough to ask them if it’s okay to make a mess in their space, and IF they’d say yes, and IF they don’t live so far away that everything you make will get cold by the time you get it home, and IF it’s actually safe for you to be there by yourself, and IF you can manage to carry all the stuff over there and back…all of which, of course, will be a slam-dunk for every single NYT reader, since poor (or disabled) (or geographically isolated) people don’t ever read it, and if they do they’re not in the NYT’s prime demographic anyway, so nyaah.

So I’ll admit it, Bittman was walking a fine line on my personal Annoying/Useful scale already. And I think I hit upon what pushed him over to the annoying side; it’s all the stuff about ZOMGCALORIES and YUCKCHEMICALS, and although he doesn’t mention fat people specifically, he might as well. MCDONALDS AND THE UNWASHED MASSES IT’S PRACTICALLY A RECIPE FOR INTERPLANETARY FATTY BOOM BAH DOOM. Now, granted, most of his article focuses not on how people have tuna cans where their brains should be if they think this stuff is “healthy,” but on how McD’s should be ashamed of themselves for telling people it’s “healthy” when it’s not. Why, he demands, couldn’t it be made with honey and skim milk instead? (Er, maybe because they tested it and people didn’t like it?)

But all you have to do is read one page of the comments to know that the implication is exactly what Bittman intends; you ARE a tuna-brain if you eat this stuff, ever, even with a free coupon. Making your own oatmeal, or your own whatever, is what sets you apart from the hoi polloi, who are foolish enough to think five minutes waiting alone in the drive-through for a little peace and quiet is some sort of gift. Because you know EXACTLY what it’s like to have to work two jobs to feed your kids and only get three hours of sleep a night, and one more set of dirty dishes plus a microwave mop-up shouldn’t faze anyone, period, end of sentence.

But seriously, is this stuff any worse for you than instant oatmeal you buy in the market? Or at Starbuck’s? And frankly, with my digestive wonkitude, it’s practically the only thing I could eat there for breakfast (hold the cream), if I was on the road or something. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the onus against “processed” food, and I wonder where the line is for the foodie scolds. Isn’t everything we eat processed in some way? Is my brown-rice pasta, which consists of brown rice flour and water, a “processed” food? After all, that’s not how rice looks coming off the bush, right? My Daiya (non-dairy) cheese is processed all the way, and Whole Foods sells it proudly. Fish from the fish market? Well, it’s not like they have a boat and a net and a freshly stocked lake in the back of the store and they just throw it off the boat to you; someone has to take the bones out and clean it and pack it and treat it to prevent spoilage.

Look, I’m all in favor of nutrition, and I’d definitely say that if millions of people have to make the choice every day of “eat McDonald’s or starve,” that’s a pretty sad state of affairs. But then again, I don’t see anyone rushing in to fill the vacuum with anything better — that is, of comparable price point, ubiquity, and near-universal digestibility, plus more optimal nutrition. Know what’s really not healthy? Not eating at all. I’m not sure where the foodie scolds get the idea that it would be better to let poor people starve to death than give them McD’s, but way too many of them seem to believe that, and it’s scary.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

48 Responses to “How A Bowl of Oatmeal Pissed Me Off”

The other thing they sell at whole foods which the crunchy types never bat an eye at is Tofu, which is soy processed literally to within an inch of its life. Not all “processed” food is satanic devil feed and some people need to get down off their high horse. Blargh!!!

A conversation I had online a couple nights ago has convinced me that the vast majority of the people who think processed food is evil, that there is such a thing as “real” food and that of course real food is healthier full stop, and that chemicals in food are evil… don’t have a freaking clue.

Basically, there was a “mock/copycat Red Lobster cheddar bay biscuits” recipe on a food/craft blog I follow. The blog author said that she modified it from a recipe that “called for Bisquick (yuk!)”. Someone down further in the comments said “I agree, Bisquick is practically poison, have you seen the ingredients?!” Then she specifically highlighted the supposedly unnecessary and probably dangerous chemicals on the ingredients by name – sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate, and went on to ask why people were so stupid they eat that poison instead of using real ingredients like flour, shortening, and baking powder to make their own biscuits. She was basically given a standing ovation.

I’m a damn good cook, and I like knowing the hows and whys of what goes on when cooking. So I knew right off that those dangerous chemicals sounded really familiar.

Ten seconds and a Google search later I figured out why… baking powder is made of baking soda, cornstarch, sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate.

The other “not real food, too processed!” stuff in there? Enriched white flour and shortening. They just break down the former by listing all the B complex vitamins they’re required by law to add to the flour (which flour from the store ALSO has) and instead of saying shortening they say “partially hydrogenated cottonseed and/or palm oil”. Which until the trans-fat panic was the primary ingredient in shortening also, but now they use fully hydrogenated and “texture enhancers” lol.

Honestly, I wish this whole “real food” thing would die. There is usually not too much difference between the same food made at home and at a fast food place — I broke down a quarter pounder once, and the McDonald’s one actually came out ahead in sodium, pretty much the same in cholesterol, fat, protein, etc, and if I remember right only 100 some odd calories more than the home version. Now, if you used super expensive ingredients you can probably improve the numbers a good bit, but the cost would probably triple and I was trying to stay around the same price per burger so I was using the same cheaper grade stuff they probably use. And I’m doubtful that you could improve it all that much nutrition wise. Flavor wise, definitely, but nutritionally it’ll probably be not enough difference to bother with.

I have some Better Batter pancake and biscuit mix coming tomorrow; I can hardly wait. I have missed biscuits SO FREAKING BAD. The BB mix has marginally more fiber than Bisquick, but good goddess, is it expensive, especially if you have to have it shipped. I have serious Bisquick envy.

And that is hilarious about the baking powder. I wonder if any of those people ever take vitamins.

I know the food companies can put some scary crap in their food, but this is why we need to not only read the labels but *understand the words we are reading*!

Many box (or nowadays bag too) ‘quick fix’ foods are just the simple ‘scratch’ ingredients premixed for our convienence (sry sp?) and maybe dehydrated. Technically ‘processed,’ but no faker than what you would make yourself. Also ‘processed’ food has been around since the days of salting and drying meat, drying and canning fruits and vegetables, and oh lets see…turning milk into cheese!! “Processed = evil” my ample fanny.

The more blog posts and subsequent response discussions I read, the more I think it’s not a bout ‘facts’ but perception.

I will say that I was cheering when Bittmann pointed out how homemade rolled oats is significantly cheaper than instant. Like, 25-to-50-cents a serving.

Now, if you insist on steelcut with soy milk and imported sundried fruit it’ll cost more, but if you’re going for basic rolled outs with some honey and milk (or my fave, cooked in half-water-half-apple juice) then it IS cheaper.

Unlike, say, the double cheeseburgers that McD’s sells for $1. I can’t buy the ingredients for that.

“But then again, I don’t see anyone rushing in to fill the vacuum with anything better”
Oh so much this.

I lost patience with Bittman, though I liked most of his Minimalist segements on TV, after I discovered during one segment that he’s friends with Jamie Oliver and they blathered on about how if more people cooked at home everyone would lose weight, and it’s so easy you lazy people, and blah blah. I enjoy and generally prefer cooking at home but the whole thing invoked the opposite feeling in me. Like damn, show me your easy recipe, that the product is yum to eat, and shut up, and I’ll be more likely to make it.
Food snobs ruin pure enjoyment of food for me by making it a moral issue. Sometimes I just want a damn burger.

Erin S has reminded me – there was this great little British series on TV here recently called ‘E Numbers’, where a mostly non-douche food writer decided to research the e-numbers that food snobs and health food purists are often so afraid of. It was interesting to learn that many of them are barely processed at all and from completely natural ingredients (like E410/locust bean gum is just deskinned, milled, sieved carob). A key point of the show too was that we expect to be able to buy things from supermarkets whenever we want, and have them last for decent amounts of time, but also freak out about additives and foods being processed; the former is usually impossible without the latter.

ooh, thats another thing I hate — the “if everyone cooked at home you’d all be magically thin and delicious!” thing. I DO cook at home, probably 25 days out of the month. Probably more than a celebrity chef does honestly.

Yeah, that’s another thing that burns my chestnuts. All these people probably have bevies of fawning assistants and interns to help them with everything. So just get yourself some interns, and presto! It’s starting to remind me of that Monty Python bit called “How To Do It,” where they tell you (all on the same program) “how to play the flute, split the atom, create box-girder bridges, and irrigate the Sahara to make vast new areas cultivatable! But first, here’s Jackie to tell us how to rid the world of all known diseases!”

All of my fat friends cook at home way more than I do (and I do quite a lot), and I’m the one with the thin privilege.
No wait, what I mean is, they all eat at McDonald’s every night and then sneak into Bittman’s house and pee in his cornflakes, and I live on a pure moral diet of leafy greens and lentils which I cook in water I purify myself.

The last part is where you got to what pissed me off: the foodier than thou part. He is pissed that everybody isn’t at home, cooking their own oatmeal. It was like past articles of his where he urges people to make their own soup stock, instead of buying it (like everybody has 2-3 hours to do this), or…horror of horrors, PEOPLE DON’T MAKE THEIR OWN MAYO. THEY BUY TEH STUFF IN THE STORE. It’s like being freaked out because everybody isn’t sewing their own clothes or framing their own houses. Not everybody will do it all the time, or do it perfectly healthfully. Get over it, Bittman.

Reminds me of an old Emeril Lagasse episode. He was making mayo and it didn’t work; he shrugged, opened the fridge and pulled out a jar of Hellman’s saying “this is perfectly good mayonnaise ” and carried on with the show

I love to cook, but I don’t make my own mayo and I use instant oatmeal when I eat oatmeal. I like the convenience. I often cook for more than an hour a day, but I don’t find it necessary to make my own soup stock. I read labels and try to find the food with the healthiest ingredients.

Thanks, that article rubbed me the wrong way, too.
Here’s the thing — sometimes I leave the house without having eaten breakfast or made lunch. That’s life — it happens. So, what’s my best bet — being the totally distracted consumer that I am? I generally grab breakfast at starbucks, which is convenient and probably way too expensive for my budget, but it’s pleasant. Is it faster than cooking at home? Maybe not, but it’s a tiny oasis in my day to have someone other than me prepare my food and coffee just the way I like it. Thing is, if I tried to make the same thing at home it would take me four times as long because of the puppy and the kindergartener and the husband interrupting me and making requests of me that I can only avoid by being out of the house. I admit it, I flee the house so I can eat and drink in peace. If I make oatmeal in my office kitchen, it looks like I’m leisurely lounging around the 90 seconds it takes for it to cook, plus every nosey person can see what I’m eating for breakfast, and I like milk in my oatmeal and if I didn’t bring my lactose-free milk with me in a spill-free container or open a shelf-stable box of soy milk that I’m going to end up using a tiny bit of before it spoils and needs to be tossed I won’t be having it exactly the way I like it.
Many mornings, it’s a spinach-feta-egg white wrap from Starbucks, a venti coffee misto with soy milk (not too hot) and sugar-free cinnamon dolce syrup (7 pumps) for breakfast, and I grab a roasted vegetable sandwich and a banana for lunch. Cheap? No. Convenient? Yes. Healthy? I don’t care. I am buying the ability to eat my breakfast in peace, and drink my coffee while it’s just the right temperature.

THANK YOU! There are things I like about the article, because being cooking phobic not too long ago I realize there are people out there that think non-instant oatmeal is hard to do. But, after going on a gluten-free diet, cooking 95% of my own meals, and lots of “unprocessed” food (whatever that is), I haven’t lost one pound. My insides are full of healthy goodness but it hasn’t made me any less of a DEATHFATZ.

Another irony is that, for my body, oatmeal is one of the worst possible choices I can make in the morning. No idea why, but it spikes my blood sugar EVERY TIME (I’m not diabetic but I do have insulin resistance issues thanks to PCOS). That sausage biscuit that he mentions with such disdain would probably be a better choice, protein-wise, than even his steel-cut homemade oatmeal.

I miss oatmeal so badly (I like it with brown sugar, applesauce, and nuts) but I can only ever eat it as an afternoon snack without being starving/dozy within an hour.

I miss oatmeal too, terribly. (I like mine with butter and brown sugar.) But I can’t eat it at all because it bothers my gut pretty much as badly as gluten does. And yes, even the gluten free oats do too. 😦

I agree with your points about this particular article, but I have to say that I was cheered by Bittman’s initial article about shifting from his cooking columns to food commentary. I started reading, waiting for him to bring up the obeeeeeeeesity crisis as a reason to focus on better food… but then… he didn’t. No mention of it at all. And I cheered (in my mind).

Not to say that he hasn’t talked about it at other times — I don’t read him regularly. But given an easy opportunity to jump on the bandwagon, he didn’t.

@O.C.
I too have loved his work as a columnist so far, all except for this article which also rubbed me the wrong way. I like to think of his earlier stuff as more ” broad food politics” (e.g. where agricultural subsidies go) and this as more preachy “don’t eat that!” I actually thought that some of the comments on the nytimes site took him to task pretty well for that.

I don’t know this guy but I know his type. And Foodier Than Thou really does describe it. Ugh.

Many things I actually agree with, and we actually do a lot of what he promotes….make our own stock, cook with whole foods, etc. It hasn’t made us skinny but I do think it’s a good idea in general.

But when they start pontificating and over-generalizing and moralizing about food, it drives me nuts. It certainly makes me want to go out and do everything I’m not “supposed” to do, right then and there.

Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is.

Again with the mis-use of addiction now to shame people for their personal tastes. These often relate to the balance and make up of what their body needs.

He’s whinning because it is his crude belief in controlling people’s most intimate responses with outside dictates of good and bad foods. Often falls down in real life in the way McD’s has exposed presumably trying to make oatmeal taste like something their customers would drool over.

It shows one of the many reasons why a lot of people are often better off just eating what they want. It’s false to assume that if they ate what healthists want them to eat that they’d eat it in the same way.

The new food Puritanism is just as unhealthy as every other unhealthy style of eating. I must say, though I had a completely different take on this article. He’s calling out a major corporation for taking a perfectly good, perfectly cheap ingredient and ‘adding value’ by adding unnecessary crap to it and then charging more, while claiming it’s a healthy choice.

I didn’t think he was pointing the finger at fatties, but at a major corporation.

People should be able to eat what they want without being scolded for it. But McDonalds is pretending this food is something it’s not, and that’s what I have a problem with.

If he had stopped there, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. But the stuff about people being “addicted to sickly sweet foods” and specific mention of calories does seem to feed right into the MCDONALD’S IS MAKING EVERYONE FAT ZOMG cliche set. Even if he’s taking McDonald’s to task, the strong implication is that the “better” people are the ones who don’t have a sweet tooth and never set foot in the place, ever.

I’m certain that there are people who like plain oatmeal, but I suspect that they are in the minority. Adding a bit of fruit, nuts, sugar of some sort, whatever for flavor is very much something that appeals to most people’s tastes.

But then, I doubt that consideration ever crosses the minds of people just looking for an excuse to bash the evil evil McDonalds that apparently they’re forced to go to and eat at, possibly at gun point or something.

I don’t disagree with that. I certainly add a pile of stuff to my oatmeal.

But McDonalds isn’t just adding dried fruit and sugar and so on – the cream is composed of seven different ingredients. Why not just cream? Why not just oatmeal? Why would they need to add ‘natural flavour’?

Even if they have learned that people like the extra additives, why don’t they announce these extras on their website? If you look at their marketing, the dish appears composed of all natural ingredients.

@Alexie: two big reasons. One is what I was talking about above. We expect a lot from our food, especially packaged and fast food. It needs to stay fresh while at the same time being available exactly when we want it, each lot needs to taste the same as the last, and this is virtually impossible on the large scale we require in modern food production – particularly fast food production – without the additives that allow this to happen. We expect the convenience but not the additives, which is unrealistic and tends to ignore our own roles in this (e.g we want the packet of biscuits that stays fresh for a week minimum) in favour of a ‘big bad company trying to poison us’ idea.

Second is marketing, which usually entails the dishonesty of omission.

Where I’m coming from is that for the past three years I’ve lived in a culture (central Europe) that has very strict food labelling laws. What is sold here has to be what it says it is. So if something is said to have meat, or fruit or whatever, then that’s what it has – not 25% meat or fruit or whatever. I once went round the supermarket to test the idea and was amazed at what I saw.

Whereas when I travel back to the English speaking countries, I’m appalled at the deceptive practices, where once I didn’t notice them. In the UK and the USA, you need a degree in nutrition to uncover what’s going on. All the onus is on the consumer to research their own food, not on the companies to state plainly, upfront, what’s in the package.

The interesting fallout from this is something you note in your post, which I’d never considered before – freshness. I was surprised at how quickly fresh food seemed to rot or go off. It took me a while to realise that my relationship with food was a totally artificial one – that I really had NO IDEA how long food, including fruit and vegetables, last for if they’re not treated with something. Things like biscuits actually last as per usual, whereas bread goes stale faster.

Yeah in NZ where I am labels are fairly good. Not as good as much of central Europe, but not as bad as the US. I’m very pro accurate labeling, just on the basic of being very pro people having the ability to easily know about what they consume in general (e.g. personally I have insulin resistance issues and from what my friends in the US say about HFCF I would find supermarket shopping very involved there).
But I like convenience too. Here when I make my own biscuits it’s so humid they mould in a couple of days, tops, unless I freeze them, so I am perfectly willing to accept various additives in trade off for having a product that lasts. But I like being able to make an informed choice!

I lived in the Czech Republic for four years, and one of the things I noticed when I came home is that I had really lost my taste for super-processed stuff. It wasn’t that I had eaten a ton of it before I left to live abroad, but I certainly waxed nostalgic a lot about canned soup and other convenience foods when I was abroad, only to come home and find that they just don’t taste as good as what I can prepare from whole foods. I’m lucky because I have the time (or my husband does, depending on which of us is working more at the moment) to prepare food like this. Not everyone does, and I recognize the privilege.

Just found this web site and I love this post! Yes, the Bittman article annoyed me to no end. He is a scold. And I like his cookbooks! But geez, the sanctimony I could do without. Here’s one of my beefs: he’s all lets care about the animals, but god forbid if you use margarine (or I’m also thinking about vegetable shortening specifically for pie crust) because those items are so, so ickily processed. I mean, we do buy less meat and it is non factory farmed, but I cannot afford to buy non-factory farmed butter on a regular basis. It is too much of a staple so yes, every time I can make the substitution I’ll use margarine (or veg shortening as noted). He and Michael Pollan are catnip for those who equate dietary behavior with morality, that’s for sure. But what is worse than a Bittman column in the Times?– well, that would be the commenters. I really like it when they bring in the whole public health consequences argument. Yeah, how nice that these goals align with your personal predilections and narcissism.

Let’s face it. Naked oatmeal? You may as well hang wallpaper with it, because the taste is just not there. Oatmeal is simply a conveyance for condiments like milk, sugar, nuts, fruit and the like.

The oat-bran low-cholesterol zanies brought this on us. It has oats, so it’s healthy…. BAH! For my tastes, oatmeal is just so much empty consumption that I would rather spend on other stuff. As a child, I had wars with my mom because she insisted on feeding us “hot cereal” to stay warm in winter. I have a great jacket and a handsome layer of pudge, so please pass the Raisin Bran (I crave Raisin Bran)

Your mileage may vary.

As for processed foods, unless you are a subsistence farmer with livestock and you have a well on your property, virtually everything you put into your mouth is processed.

Bittman needs to buy a vowel. Since the 60’s the fast food places have known that their restaurants were not about the food. Not even about the convenience. It’s about the experience, Bitty, you nitwit! Whether it’s the gathering of a gaggle of 8 year olds to scoop a quart of ketchup with a half cup of fries, or a harried mom to get 5 minutes of solace in the drive-thru lane as she waits for a breakfast sandwich & coffee, fast food is more of an occasion than a meal.

The foodier-than-thou types want us all to make the occasions of our lives meal prep. Just like I will not live and die by the diet journal, I will not exist to validate my purchase of a stockpot by having it in constant use.

Sometimes, you just have to grab & go, and you need apologize to no one. Bite me, Bitty.